Bokhari’s performance shows political campaigns really do matter

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/04/2016 (3647 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari had just finished a breakfast speech to the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce on Wednesday morning when she was asked a rather innocuous question.

The man posing the question was chambers president Chuck Davidson, a long-time political observer. Davidson wanted to know, all things being equal, whether she was “enjoying the process” of a provincial election campaign.”

Bokhari smiled at Davidson, which suggested to the audience that this may have been a topic of conversation during the breakfast portion of the morning’s events, when both shared the head table. “I’m enjoying the process. Let’s just leave it at that,” she said.

Let the record show that Bokhari went on to talk a bit more about her experience leading a political party through an election campaign. But the message was clear: this has been a rough road for the rookie politician.

After a relatively smooth launch in the first week of the campaign, Bokhari and the Liberals began to engineer one of the longest streaks of self-inflicted political wounds ever suffered by a party in the throes of a Manitoba election race. The Liberals have lost candidates to nomination snafus and an endless string of revelations of past misdeeds — some quite serious — that should have been identified through a proper background vetting, a must-have function of any modern election campaign.

But an absence of proper candidate vetting has not been the only problem. Liberal policy announcements have been sloppy and confused at times, while Bokhari has been inarticulate at a moment when her party most needed her to offer a clear and well-enunciated vision.

Bokhari’s struggles remind all of us of two of the most fundamental and inconvenient truths about electoral politics.

First, that campaigns really do matter.

And second, that it is really, really hard to make politics look easy.

The chambers breakfast offered evidence of both hard truths. During her brief speech, Bokhari tried valiantly to cover a lot of her party’s policies, including initiatives for improving health care, infrastructure, tax fairness and a more modern social safety net. However, as earnest as she came across, her language was awkward and her delivery stilted. Many of her assertions were rushed and disjointed. Ultimately, she resorted to statements that were little more than a loosely connected string of electoral buzzwords.

Performances like this raise the prospect that despite evidence the Liberals were ready to become a bona fide player in this province’s political arena, Manitoba will remain a two-dimensional marketplace where only the Progressive Conservatives and NDP are competent enough to compete for the right to form government. That is not, in the long run, a good thing for democracy.

For evidence to support this assertion, one need only look at the last 30 years of Manitoba politics.

The Tory government of premier Gary Filmon ruled for 11 years. That was followed by 16 years of NDP government. The absence of a viable Liberal alternative during those years meant Tory and New Democrat premiers could wrack up long periods of uninterrupted rule where they were under no immediate threat of being defeated. Not since the 1988 election, when then-Liberal leader Sharon Carstairs won a remarkable 20 seats and left a stunned PC party with a minority government, have we seen true competitiveness from all three major parties.

What has gone wrong with the Liberal campaign?

Much of the current Liberal travails can be traced back to a lack of organizational depth. Although she has been leader since October 2013, Bokhari has failed to assemble a large enough, or experienced enough, team of organizers, strategists and grunt volunteers.

The absence of a comprehensive ground game is bad, but it does not have to be a fatal mistake. Canadian politics is littered with tales of political parties that did not have the volunteers, the funds or the organizational competence and still managed to make gains. The federal NDP in the 2011 federal election is a great example of a party that found momentum in the electorate without organizational savvy.

Had the Bokhari Liberals managed to be just modestly competent, and managed to get a legitimate candidate on the ballot in all 57 ridings, there is a good chance they would have been able to make significant gains in this election. Of course, with only one sitting MLA now (Jon Gerrard), even a second seat in the legislature could have been positioned as a major victory for the new leader.

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But competence has been out of reach for Bokhari. Of greater concern is the fact that, in the face of traditional campaign adversity, Bokhari and her campaign have taken to accusing the media of ignoring or dismissing her policies out of hand. In one instance, she argued that news organizations were ignoring her ideas because they were afraid of angering the NDP government, which purchased many advertisements in newspapers and on radio and television stations.

This past week, a senior campaign staffer circulated an email to most news organizations outlining a plan to have party supporters circle the wagons and avoid talking to reporters from the CBC who were trolling for dissident critics in Liberal ranks. The staffer claimed the note was supposed to go out to all media, but it was hard to see how this was anything other than an inadvertent click of the send button.

As mentioned, campaigns do matter. It is a time of severe scrutiny in which many voters make decisions about who to vote for based on what they see and hear. What voters have seen and heard from Bokhari has been amateurish at best.

As well, it is hard to make politics look easy. That is a lesson Bokhari is learning now. The real shame is that unless she is somehow able to turn her campaign around, it is unlikely Manitoba Liberals will give her the chance to use that lesson learned in future elections.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Dan Lett
Columnist

Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986.  Read more about Dan.

Dan’s columns are built on facts and reactions, but offer his personal views through arguments and analysis. The Free Press’ editing team reviews Dan’s columns before they are posted online or published in print — part of the our tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.